91-year-old blind, African American author comes to Central Library

My name is Eva Fields and I'm sending this to tell you that my grandma Eva Rutland www.evarutland.com will be signing books in Portland. Mrs. Rutland wrote a memoir entitled "When We Were Colored, a Mother's Story" that tells her story of being a young black mother raising four children in California during the early days of integration of the 1950s and 1960s. Upbeat and funny, she states in her introduction "I was born in the olden days, when pot was a cooking utensil, webs were for spiders and civil rights were for white folks." She tells stories all mothers can relate to. Stories like taking her four children all under the age of eight to the 5-and-10 (the five and dime) three days before Christmas and 5-year-old Ginger having a break down in the store because she spent all her money and forgot to buy her daddy a present. She peppers her stories with reminders of the special problems that blacks faced. She ends the Christmas story with a lament about having to walk past Woolworths during the Civil Rights era when the store was being picketed for because they would not serve blacks at their lunch counters in the South. She states "but pass it up I did. This was bigger than my pockets. These young people were bigger than me---and I couldn't let them down."

Eva Rutland is now 91-years-old and blind but she continues to write. She has published over 20 novels and is currently working on her sequel to "When We Were Colored," tentatively entitled "Grandma Troubles." She will be signing books and talking about her life on:Saturday March 15th, 1:00 PMCentral Library - Multnomah County801 SW 10th AvePortland, OR 97205